HillBuzz

What’s on your minds this Monday?

What are people talking about in your parts of the country?

What’s on your minds this Sunday?

What are people talking about in your part of the country?

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Happy Birthday to Trig Palin…the little guy turns TWO today.  Last night in Washington, IL we heard Governor Palin speak and she told us that every morning Trig wakes up, rubs the Sand Man’s dust from his eyes, giggles, and starts applauding.  That’s how the little champ greets each day.  With thunderous applause and laughter.  She says she knows he understands challenges, and that he certainly gets frustrated and has his ups and downs, even at two, but that every morning his natural cheer and kind spirit pops to life the moment he wakes, revved up to start a new day and enjoy it to the fullest.

You better believe we’re going to remember that from now on, every morning we wake up.  Each day is a gift, folks.  It should indeed be met with applause and thanks, for we are all blessed to get a chance every morning to do something incredible, something fun, something joyous, because we’ve been given another day above ground.

Trig Palin’s an angel undercover — with a clear mission to us: to inspire, to challenge, to make us think, and TO LEAD by his simple and heartfelt example.

We’ll have more on the Governor’s speech later today when we have a chance to type up our notes, but we had to share this bit with you, as we all send little Trig our best wishes on his big day.

Happy Birthday Trig!

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This is just too hilarious, so don’t drink anything while reading it, but according to Limelife Magazine, “Jake Gyllenhaal is just looking for the right woman”.

Where?

At MiniBar in Boystown?

Honey, “the right woman” is not going to be found there.  Her brother, on the other hand, could possibly be one of the shirtless bartenders swirling your cosmo.

We’re stunned the article didn’t include a shot of Jakey-G walking with his “unidentified male friend”.  You know, doing bromance stuff.  Hanging with his bud.  Scoping out the chicks.

Fooling no one.

He might have, apparently, the most clueless and deluded talentless publicist in the biz, but Jakey-G is still a dreamboat, and from all accounts, was charming and kind to everyone while visiting Chicago a week or so ago.

It’s sad his team feels the need to do the Rock Hudson/Montgomery Clift/Tom Cruise game, and that his quest for “the right woman” is the storyline these people want to push, but that’s Hollywood for you.

Maybe all of us here will find the “right woman” someday too.  Stranger things have happened, we guess.

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What’s on your minds today?

What are people in your home towns talking about?

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HillBuzz is on the road today.  Two of us are headed down to Washington, IL to hear Sarah Palin speak at the Five Points event.

If we get close enough, we promise to make sure the Governor hears how much support she has across the country, in the most unlikely of places — including the lot of us, here in Boystown.  We’re going to tell her to run for president, and we’ll volunteer ourselves for her campaign, in whatever capacity she could use us.  We went all in for Hillary in 2008, and we’ll go all-in for Palin in 2012.

If we can communicate just one idea to her today, we’re going to tell her to take down the word “polarizing” and remove it as a weapon the media can use against her, and against all females running for office. “Polarizing” is the media’s favorite code word to attack women.  They used it against Hillary repeatedly, so that when we campaigned for her in Iowa in 2007 leading up to the Caucus, we saw it really did have an impact on voters, who thought Hillary would not win a general election because she was “too polarizing”.  Remember, many people just parrot what they hear Anderson Cooper or Chris Matthews saying on TV.

So, our idea is for Palin to embrace the word “polarizing”.  Make it her own.  ”Heck yah, I’m polarizing.  And PROUD OF IT”.  Being from Alaska, she can give an Arctic spin to the word.  ”Let’s polarize everything, like we have in Alaska.  There’s a lot of energy up towards the pole.  Let’s polarize our energy policy, and polarize towards energy independence”.

We could even take the polar bear away from the Cult of Anthropogenic Global Warming and use it as a Palin mascot — because she’s so “polarizing”.

If Palin starts now, taking away the media’s weapons against her, the Left is not creative or resourceful enough to come up with new attacks by 2012.  They’ve been using the “polarizing” thing for 20 years now.  They will not think up a new one in time.

So, that’s our best idea for how to immediately help Palin today.  Just imagine if she would write a Facebook post about the use of this word against women, and started drawing attention to the parallels between what was done to Hillary and what’s being done to Palin now.

Someone needs to expose the media’s orchestration of these attacks against women.  We hope we have the chance to urge the Governor to do this.

On the drive down to Washington, IL, we’ll probably think of other things we want to tell Palin.  And, yes, we will write them on our hands so we don’t forget, because we’ve always done that, and love that the Governor does it too.

We’ll check this thread before the event, so please fill it up with anything you think we should tell the Governor if we get the chance to see her.

If you happen to be going to the event too, drop us an email at HillBuzz@gmail.com and maybe we can meet up and say hi.  There will be a lot of people there, we’re sure, but it’s always fun running into some of you unexpectedly like this.

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UPDATE:  We did get to meet the Governor — and Todd — as well as some very interesting and amazing Americans in central Illinois…as well as a longtime reader, Kathy, and her husband, which was a real treat.

It was a long drive there and back, and quite an adventure, but a full report will be up tomorrow, and hopefully cross-posted over at Convservatives4Palin, too, because the speech the Governor gave was just incredible — and something we think all Americans need to hear.

Todd is even more awesome in person, by the way.  For the record.

Sarah Palin’s done it again — with gusto.

Read her Facebook post up today smacking the White House for more of the anti-American-exceptionalism garbage the current president so fondly vomits on the world stage.

Tomorrow, we get to hear Palin in person, in Washington, IL at the Five Points event she’s doing.

If any of you are going, maybe we’ll see you there.  If so, we hope you say hi.

You betcha.

What’s on your minds this Friday?

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Did you see Michelle Malkin’s post on would-be Tea Party crashers? She’s got great photos of the Tea Party crowds calling out Alinsky Leftists who tried to disrupt the protests yesterday — they had large INFILTRATOR signs they used to block out the signs the Alinsky troops had, which they tried to use to paint the Tea Party as something that it’s not.  Their goal was to depict the protests as violent and racist, because, of course, that’s what the Left accuses anyone that opposes it of being.  But, they failed spectacularly.

Epic Fail.

We realize the lot of us are at a crossroads here.

There are no longer journalists in Chicago, especially not in the LGBTQ community.  When we read the papers, we see, clearly, that the real story’s not being told, and that the Leftist agenda permeates everything.  Add on top of that the Daley Machine’s influence on the Tribune and the Sun-Times, and there’s a shocking amount going on that never makes the news, that’s never talked about.

What Andrew Breitbart’s doing on BigGovernment, BigJournalism, and BreitBartTV is incredible.  What Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe did to ACORN was amazing.  Citizen journalists are the future, and America’s only hope of shining bright lights on the crime and corruption the Left does not want reported.

That said, we realize there’s a real need for someone to expose more of what’s going on in Chicago, and to do that with video, Breitbart-style.

We’ve never especially wanted to become the guys to do this, because for the longest time we’ve maintained this fantasy of someday being able to go back to our “regular lives” and leave politics behind us.  Though we love most of you out there, we have to be honest when we say that writing for this site takes an enormous amount out of us, with very little payback.  Dealing with the trolls and reading the endless hatemail wears on us, especially when we’re sick, or just exhausted from trying to keep up with the fast pace of life in a tax-choked big city.  It’s hard just keeping our heads above water, let alone churning out original content and reporting on things we think the MSM is ignoring (deliberately).

But, we collectively came to the realization some months ago that this is our watch, this is our time, and that America needs gadflies now more than ever.  So, whether we set out to fill this role or not, this is where we’re at, and we’ve built a strong enough readership and network that can’t go to waste — not when the country needs this resistance to everything unconstitutional and dictatorial the current administration is forcing upon us.

We are not tech guys, by any stretch of the imagination.  One of the “fabulous” genes we lack is a gay man’s typical lust for all things new and gadgety.  We barely own cell phones.  Some of us have no idea how to pick up our voicemails.  Texting is a rarity.  We have no idea how to film, edit, and create videos.

Much to our detriment, as we see clearly this is the future, and we’re dragging our knuckles far behind.

What we need  your help with is doing some research on how we can make the next leap in our evolution, and start thinking about acquiring discrete video equipment that we can use to do investigative journalism here in Chicago, getting the stories the MSM refuses to report on.

To be honest, a large part of what we’ll do will most likely involve going to Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky’s office and recording her staff being as rude, unprofessional, and downright nasty as they usually are.  There have been many, MANY, instances where we’ve gone to one of her field offices to give her representatives a piece of our minds, and we’ve been sworn at, told we “don’t matter”, and have been shocked by the vulgarity and hubris on display by people who supposedly work for taxpayers.

We wish we’d been wired, with button hole cameras taping the whole thing.

We’d put all that on YouTube and embarrass Schakowsky, while showing voters just who their Representative in Congress really is and how her staff conducts itself.

Then there’s other people in Chicago who we see out and about regularly, behaving badly, who are part of Mayor Daley’s bigger schemes.  If only the public saw these people for who they really are, the city’s future could be affected, as Daley would not so easily get his way.  One example of this is Ron Huberman, whom Daley is grooming to be his successor as Mayor.  Huberman, who is openly gay, lives a lavish lifestyle while presiding over a failing school system that’s at war with the Teachers’ Union over 1,300 jobs he wants to cut.  Huberman is in Sidetracks regularly, where he behaves like a giant ass, and often talks about how stupid most of the kids in CPS are.  He laughs at them, ridicules their parents, and makes it quite clear he’s just place-holding this position until he can be elevated by the Mayor to something more important, further building his resume so that he can be Mayor himself upon Daley’s retirement.

If footage of him carrying on in public like this got out, and the parents in CPS saw this, and heard what he says about them and their children, the guy would be toast — and Daley’s succession plan would collapse with him.

It’s shocking to sit down and think about what an impact we could actually have if we just wore a wire and a button hole camera in a jacket wherever we went in this city. Watching Breitbart, and the exploits of Giles & O’Keefe, we realize the only way for bad apples to be exposed is if regular people started doing the exposing, and started essentially filming everything that goes on that’s of any importance.

We all need to not just be citizens, but citizen-journalists, to fill the void that’s been left by actual, degreed journalists who forfeited their positions when they sold out completely to the propaganda aims of the Left.

So, that brings us to our crossroads — do we continue to be guys who recognize the need for more citizen-journalists and just talk about it, or do we take the scary step and force ourselves to fill that niche here in Boystown?  The summer is coming, and instead of just reporting on all the crime we see, and the gangs that terrorize the neighborhood, maybe we should step up to the plate and start recording what’s going on, learn to edit and upload those videos, and shame Mayor Daley and the Police Chief into cracking down on the Southside thugs who have turned the gayborhood into their personal hate-crime hunting ground.  The neighborhood associations and special commission setup to handle this problem have failed to make anything better for the last three years…but these people have not taped what’s going on, and have not exposed it.

What if we did?  Would that make a difference?

Won’t know unless we try.

Here’s where you can really help:  we know nothing about tech, but we’ve outlined the sorts of things we want to do out in the field, observing, recording, and reporting what’s going on in our city.

Can you research specific equipment we’d need to achieve these goals?  What would be the best audio/video equipment we’d need to do covert work like this?  And the emphasis is on the covert not just because of the potential to catch people like Schakowsky or Huberman in stings, but because when dealing with the gangs terrorizing Boystown, we want to be able to record their activities, out on the street in low light at night, without them having any idea they are being recorded.  For our own personal safety, we can’t walk around with a handicam, so we’ll need to find something totally surreptitious and well-concealed, but which can still record at good quality and pick up sound well enough to catch conversations in bars or other events that might be newsworthy.

Can those of you with good tech knowledge help us compile a wish list?  This way, we can start saving up for the equipment, while we learn the software and technical skills we’ll need to start using all of this to do the job reporters in Chicago refuse to do — for whatever reason.

Because, honestly, we just can’t sit here and do nothing and watch our neighborhood come under attack again this summer without doing something about it.  There’s no way we can chase off the gangs of Southside thugs who have been committing so many crimes here in Boystown — not physically chase them off — but maybe if we shine the light on this problem the liberals here in the gayborhood REFUSE to shine on it, and give this matter national attention, the Mayor and his Ministers of Grace will be embarrassed enough to put an end to the Center on Halsted’s misguided mission to bring the Southside’s crime north to victimize us and our friends.

Can you help us build a list of things we’d need to look into to make this possible?  Be as plain-spoken and tech ignorant as possible, and don’t assume we know what you are talking about, because when it comes to audio/video anything, chances are we’re clueless.

It’s been a little while since we’ve updated you on the status of Pie Hole Pizza here in Boystown, a place we all love very much, and will miss when it closes next month (as far as we understand, they’ll shut down some time in May, since their lease is up as of June 1st).

This is a tough one for us to report on, because we really like the cast over at Pie Hole, who are all such interesting and creative people.  Zany is a good word for them, and “cast” is apt as they are pretty much a reality-show without an audience. It’s a brightly colored, odd little world over there, open late at night here in Boystown.  We took the place for granted as part of our community, and are genuinely sad to see it go.

It was really only during the 2008 campaign that we discovered Pie Hole, when we’d order pizza just about every night to feed the people who came over to phone bank at Buzzquarters while we were running volunteer operations for Hillary Clinton here in Boystown. That’s when we became Pie Hole regulars.  We’re not big pizza-eating guys in general since, if we ate pizza all the time, we’d literally be BIG pizza-eating guys. Big in the sense that would make us not only pariahs here in the waist-conscious gayborhood, but would entitle us to our own zip code, the way we could shovel a sausage-and-marshmallow Afterschool Special in, if given the chance.  There’s a reason Oprah lives in Chicago, folks, and it’s related to pizza.

It’s a shame this place wasn’t part of our lives before the campaign, because we wish we had a few more years of adventures late at night at Pie Hole.  Many stories and posts on this site were, at the very least begun, if not fully written, on slips of notebook paper or on napkins at Pie Hole, after hanging out together at Sidetracks, Roscoes, or Cocktail just around the corner.

We feel like we came late to the party, just as the balloons were deflating and all the drinks were running out. But, it is what it is.

We also feel very conflicted and torn reporting on the latest installment in the drama of what’s happening to Pie Hole, because while we love the business and the people who work there, and After School Special is our favorite pizza of all time, we have to side with the neighborhood on a lot of the criticism of Pie Hole’s business model too.

And, this is as tough for us as it is whenever we have to confront a good friend about something bad that person does — but we wouldn’t be who we are if we didn’t tell it like it is, even if it means calling out someone we like.

In Pie Hole’s case, as much as we love the place, love the pizza, and love their cast, we need to address the issue of the gangs it attracted late at night and what management could have done differently to keep Pie Hole from being a nuisance to many in Boystown.

We’ve talked about, at length, the surge in crime in the gayborhood in the last few years, since the Center on Halsted opened and started aggressively courting young black youth from the Southside to come to Boystown to hang out all day at the Center.  They gave them free food and offered a club house to use as a base, where they’d spend all day plotting their nocturnal activities — which involves putting white gay men in the hospital on a frequent basis as soon as the weather turns nice for spring, summer, and early fall.

What started happening, about two years ago, was this:  the gangs would hang out at the Center on Halsted until it closed, sleeping, eating, and planning their attacks in the neighborhood.  At 10 or 11, when the Center closed, these thugs would then amble outside, to loiter in front of the Center or hang out on the street corner there, or along the Center’s wall on Waveland, leading to the Whole Foods parking lot and the alley there.  From roughly midnight until 2am or so, as people would start leaving bars drunk, the thugs would work the side streets, looking to overpower any single guys they could spot, hunting like wolves looking for the weak and disoriented.

Pie Hole comes into all of this since it’s open really late, until 3am (5am on weekends).

And, management never chased these thugs away.  They’d take over Pie Hole’s outdoor patio, and would hang out in front of the building, since management made a conscious decision to not chase them away.

This is an instance where a very nice person, Pie Hole’s owner, meant well but ended up contributing to the problems the community’s facing.

The thugs weren’t buying anything, were disturbing the peace, were intimidating and harassing passers-by, but Pie Hole didn’t want to be like everyone else and “chase them away”. Add in the fact that, because these “kids” are black, there’s a racial element to all of this as well, and the situation gets very complicated.

As a business, Pie Hole alienated a lot of customers by siding with the gangs, who drove business away in droves.  Many people were too scared to go there for pizza after the bars, because they did not want to deal with the Center on Halsted gang (perched at their late-night stomping grounds).  Pie Hole also made a lot of enemies in the Boystown business and property owning community, since people saw the throngs of thugs acting wild and crazy there every night, and began to associate Pie Hole with the upsurge in crime.

Just like with the Center on Halsted, if Pie Hole didn’t afford these criminals a club house, they wouldn’t be terrorizing Boystown as they’d have no base of operations.  And that’s just what the neighborhood at large came to see Pie Hole as…the Center on Halsted After Dark.

When we heard Pie Hole was losing its lease, we at first couldn’t understand why the neighborhood was letting an interesting and fun business like this close down.  There’s nothing else like it in Chicago, and it’s a gay-owned, gay-staffed, gay-serving establishment we thought the whole community would rally behind.  But, the more we dug into this, and the more we talked about the situation with other business owners, the more we realize a much bigger issue was in play…and it was the simple fact that the neighborhood feels that Pie Hole, like the Center on Halsted, contributes to the crime by giving the criminals a playground and clubhouse from which to operate.

That’s why no one rallied to help Pie Hole…they are glad to see it go, because they think part of the crime problem will go with it.

It’s hard for us to admit, because we love the place, but that’s probably true.  There were some nights last summer when Pie Hole had to close early because the Center Gang had assembled in such large numbers, and caused such a ruckus, that the police were called.  Many times, we felt unsafe walking passed the restaurant, or decided not to stop in for a slice, because the “kids” hanging around were just too loud and aggressive.

The whole thing’s a major eye-opener for us.

Sometimes, even if you really like something or someone, you have to accept the reality that there’s bad as well as good, big picture, with whatever that is.  Maybe losing a business, and a part of the community, ends up being best for the community in the long run, as hard as that is to accept in the moment.

Nothing’s ever as cut and dry, black and white, or simplistic as we’d like it to be.

We’ll miss the sausage and marshmallow pizza, the pies named after local drag queens, and all the late night laughs…but will we miss the crime if the gangs scatter earlier in the night when they no longer have a place to hang out?

The answer to that’s pretty obvious.

As much as we like pizza, we love seeing our neighborhood become a safer place with less thugs and hoodlums even more.

Today we have a very rare opportunity to sit down with an expert on Israel for a few hours, to interview her in person and ask just about anything we want.

We’ll be checking this thread until around 6pm or so CST today, so please give us some questions to ask her.

What have you always wanted to know about Israel?

Is there something going on currently you would like to hear more about?

If you found yourself across the table from an Israeli policy expert, what would you talk about?

We’re going to print out this thread and ask her every question you come up with, so please ask anything that you like, as much as you like, and we’ll report back in the next few days when we have the chance to type it all up.

We’re very excited and looking forward to the interview, and hope it’s the first of many such instances where we can have a conversation with an expert like this and expand our knowledge of a topic.

Our love for Israel is second only to our love for America, as we see Israel as this country’s greatest friend and most important ally.  We’re shamed by the way the current president treats our friends, and angered by the way he bows and scrapes before our enemies.

We’re curious to hear what the Israelis themselves think of Dr. Utopia, and what they foresee for US-Israeli relations in the future.

What’s on your minds this Thursday?

What are people talking about in your home towns?